D&D 4E Running player commentary on PCat's 4E Campaign - Heroic tier (finished)

[Sagiro]

Run #41 is in the books. It was a good one!

Brief synopsis: we had left off puzzling how to cause sunlight to reach a subterranean grating, where the direct line between the sun and the target was impeded by a tube of magically-suspended dirty water. Clearwater solution might have worked if we had more of it, but we didn’t have enough. Instead we found a long hollow log, patched it up with a Mending ritual, plugged up one end with waterproof moss and sap, and lowered it into the water tube like a straw. Once the plugged end poked out into the air, we lowered Cobalt into the hole on a rope (between the “straw” and the side wall), where he would remove the plug, and allow sunlight to spill unimpeded through the log, from the noonday sun down into the bell-jar-shaped sub-basement.

Our plan was interrupted by a Froghemoth, clinging to the side wall of the bell jar. It grabbed Cobalt with its tongue, drew him into its mouth, and started to chew. There followed a logistically-complex battle, with various party members diving down the watery shaft and clinging to the rope. The NPC (Thimbletick, the old and crazy Grey Guardsman) dove in, swung on Cobalt’s legs, and grappled the monster on purpose. The fight became easier once Thimbletick peeled the froghemoth (which we were calling a “Squog,” as in squid-frog) from the wall. The bottom of the bell jar was about 40’ down, and Logan (conveniently still up-top, with his player absent from the game) lowered the rope down so we could fight it en masse. A few dailies were hurled, and we annihilated it.

That was the first half of the night’s fun.

The second half came when the spilling light caused the lower grating to magically unlock, leading us into a straight-shot gauntlet of traps set up by someone who clearly wanted to keep unwanted visitors from the Big Treasure At The End.

The first trap was a classic “narrow hall opens into a smallish but wider room, with something cool but dangerous.” The cool-but-dangerous thing in this case was a lever sticking from a pedestal, and a closed chest right next to it. Clearly, everyone else should wait in the hall in case something awful happens when the lever is pulled. Right? Except that on closer examination with Thievery, Dungeoneering and Perception checks, we figured out that pulling the lever was probably going to cause the corridor walls on either side of the little room to smash together. Sure enough, that’s what happened, but we were all safe in the room with the chest. Which opened. To Reveal a key inside. Which we took.

The next trap had already been sprung – a dead mimic in an alcove. Since we had pinged Level 9 after the Squog fight, Strontium used his new Level 9 Daily: Animate Dead. So now we had a dead chest-shaped mimic ambling on in front of us, which was great, because there were more traps!

The mimic first set off a Glyph of Warding (yay!), and then revealed the deadly nature of the trap after that, by getting ripped apart by it. To elaborate: it was a large (40’ x 60’, I think) room, with 6” of mist covering the floor. At the opposite end of the room is a vault door, slightly ajar. The mimic moved into the room, at which point four smoky tentacles formed out of the mist and tore it into pieces. Ok! Let’s not do that! Bramble, the Shaman, experimented by summoning her Spirit Companion out into the middle of the room, above the mist. No good. Spirit annihilated by mist-acles.

But Perception and Arcana checks, made concurrently with Thicket’s dissolution, revealed glowing circles on the floor (under the mist) at each corner of the room. Strontium figured out that a) the tentacles would attack anything in the room that was taller than 6 inches high (i.e. stuck out of the mist), and b) that if creatures could somehow get to all four corners simultaneously, the trap would be disarmed.

Our solution: Far left corner: Thicket, Spirit Companion, summoned directly to the desired location. Far right corner: Strontium’s Familiar, small enough to scoot below the mist level. Near left corner: Mule, conjured with Cobalt’s 10’ Pole of Mule Summoning. Near right corner: Cobalt, pole vaulting into place using the aforementioned pole.

Success! Trap disabled. Our reward? A creepy voice from beyond the vault door, announcing “Death Abides.”

End session.

Tactical notes on the Squog fight:

- Piratecat used someone’s home-made Level 14 solo Froghemoth, and dialed it back into something more level appropriate. It had attacks it could make every round as minor, move and standard actions, so it could pummel someone good every round.
- To wit: on the very first round of combat, it reduced Cobalt from 59 to 20 health, and it could have been worse.
- Objectively this fight wasn’t particularly challenging. The modified Squog was about a Level 9 Elite, against a party of 6 Level 8 characters. In practice, things started out hairy because of its superior tactical position, clinging to wall while we lowered ourselves down on ropes. Once it was grounded, and we could more-or-less surround it, we destroyed it.
- The Squog had a brutal auto-when-bloodied attack, but it missed almost everyone. I see that in the stat block for the original monster, that attack was simply an Encounter Power. That makes me wonder: which is better to have? The obvious advantage of the Encounter Power is that you can choose an optimal time and place to use it. With the triggered-when-bloodied, it’s possible that most enemies aren’t in range, and the power is wasted. On the other hand, the triggered version has the huge advantage of action economy.
- Cobalt has becomes resigned to his role as party “bait.” With no defender in the group, he has the highest AC and REF in the party, and has 3 different ways to trigger healing surges on himself. (Inspiring Word from Warlord MC feat, Stanching Armor, and his second wind.) Also, he’s naturally reckless, which helps.
- This combat marked the 817th time since the game began that the wizard Strontium couldn’t make good use of Acid Arrow because the splash damage would burn allies.
- Between Stron’s Phantasmal Assailant, Gilran’s Darkfire, and his own Adaptable Flanker, Cobalt had combat advantage almost the whole fight, despite never actually flanking with someone. I (heart) my friends!
- This fight may have been the only one we’ve had thus far where we didn’t use a battle map. The vertical, 3-D nature of the fight meant that Piratecat was drawing pencil sketches on a blank paper, erasing and redrawing PC’s as we moved around, and giving us approximate distances when relevant. Although I’m a big fan of tactical grid maps generally, it worked very well. I think the fact that there was only one enemy made it feasible.

- Here’s a link to the original Level 14 froghemoth:

Musings of the Grumpy GM: Froghemoth - Level 14 Solo Brute

Notable differences in Piratecat’s version include:
- 246 HP, instead of the 500+
- Defenses about 6 lower
- No “Swallow Whole” ability
- No stun attached to its “Stunning Croak” – it was just damage

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

The first trap was a classic “narrow hall opens into a smallish but wider room, with something cool but dangerous.” The cool-but-dangerous thing in this case was a lever sticking from a pedestal, and a closed chest right next to it. Clearly, everyone else should wait in the hall in case something awful happens when the lever is pulled. Right? Except that on closer examination with Thievery, Dungeoneering and Perception checks, we figured out that pulling the lever was probably going to cause the corridor walls on either side of the little room to smash together. Sure enough, that’s what happened, but we were all safe in the room with the chest. Which opened. To Reveal a key inside. Which we took.

Someone's been reading

Spoiler

Grimtooth's Traps!

Take inspiration from the classics, Piratecat!

 

[Piratecat]

Some notes from this game:

- The froghemoth was less than half an encounter (one lvl+1 elite vs a whole party) on purpose. I wanted a fun, fast fight that was challenging but quickly finished. As a result, I put him in a tactically challenging location and set him up to dish out lots of damage. Never fall into the trap that every one of your fights has to be against the requisite number and strength of monsters specified in the DMG. So long as there's a challenge or an interesting element, pacing is much more important.

- It's a little odd to have a trap-filled dungeon out in the middle of the swamp. But by God, it's called Dungeons & Dragons for a reason, and it had been too long since we'd done anything with tricks and traps. If I can tie this into larger world secrets (and that's the plan), I feel pretty good about it, particularly when they got to meet the forgotten Grey Guardsman Grimble Thimbletick. I think he's my favorite NPC in ages.

- You'll notice that I try to handle traps in a way that requires the players to think. To wit: getting sunlight down past the muddy water didn't require many skill rolls (a nature check to find the tree, a make whole ritual to plug its holes after carving it out) but did require them to think outside the box. Likewise, the hallway trap required a small skill challenge to handle, and with every success I told them another piece. "the lever is attached to huge counterweights." "The counterweights probably move walls." They figured the rest out on their own.

Likewise, the room with the mist could be solved without damage if the PCs thought it through. They ended up using a strategy I didn't consider, and it worked wonderfully. The goal there was to make them use class abilities, feats and magic items I was pretty sure ("Hey! I have a familiar!") they had forgotten about.

We're not done with that floor yet. There's some fun still to come!

- Grimble is a psionic defender. Very brave, fairly competent, completely eccentric, convinced that the sky talks to him and tells him about the horrible things waiting beyond it. He's been out in the swamp a long time.

- I love mimics and froghemoths. There was a funny exchange where Eli Caldwell said "What, a monster that looks like a chest? That's ludicrous. Next thing you know there will be monsters designed for square hallways, or monsters that are supposed to look like a ceiling or a floor or a cloak. Ludicrous."

- Caldwell reacted really badly to Stron's use of the animate dead spell. The phrase "necromancer" got bandied around. Stron doesn't seem to know what all the fuss is.

Finally, I wanted to mention that everyone in our group is a current or former staff member of Otherworld. We're filling up the final slots for this year's event, and we would absolutely love it if some of you guys came. So we're inviting you! Shoot me questions by email (kevin dot kulp at gmail) or in this thread.

 

[Kobold Boots]

Hey Piratecat -

Thanks for posting that link to Otherworld. Didn't know they existed.

KB

 

[Piratecat]

Sagiro considers last night's game one of the best three of the campaign to date. I consider that a great compliment. I'm digging back to old school 1e modules for trap inspiration, working to fit them neatly into a 4e framework, so that's a sign that it's working.

One of the early D&D podcasts run by Chris Perkins for the Penny Arcade guys had a trap where dwarven statues breathe fire. The guys tried some clever methods to try and stop it and the DM disallowed them; there was a right way and you had to use the correct mechanics to achieve it. It's fair to say that's pretty much diametrically opposed to my own philosophy. I'm a big believer in traps that are deadly unless you figure out the trick, and then you use creative game mechanics to help complete that. The trapped floor in the end of the last writeup is a good example of that. Try to walk across it and four misty tentacles attack you for 4d8 dmg per hit.. but watch the mist (perception or arcana checks) and you see four glowing sigils. Arcana checks let you know that creatures (not just inanimate things) on all four sigils deactivates the mist trap. Then it's a player creativity challenge to figure out ways to get creatures onto them without suffering attacks in the process.

You'll see a few more like this when Sagiro writes up this session. Interestingly, prep time totalled (as it does for just about all of my games to date) about 15-30 minutes. My bitches about 4e's status/condition tracking aside, there's a savage joy in how quickly and easily I can prep for even complex games.

And in a slight teaser, I managed to remove 30 healing surges from the party in ten minutes of real time.

 

[vagabundo]

The RPGA tomb of horrors - if you can get it - has some really nice fiendish traps. I was very impressed at how well they were implemented in 4e mechanics.

 

[Sagiro]

Run #42 was tonight. It was one of the best of the campaign; possibly the very best. Pure harrowing fun.

We were standing in a hall that empties into a huge room, 60 feet across and 80 feet long. Opposite our hallway, 80’ away, were the exit doors. We had just diffused a trap in this room; now it appeared empty, except for the four corners, which, if you read the previous installment, you’ll know contained a summoned mule, a shaman’s Spirit Companion, a wizard’s familiar, and Cobalt, respectively. A raspy voice from the door had just uttered “death abides.”

Cobalt took a step toward the door – and slid. The floor was effectively frictionless. He slid across the entire room and was stopped by a wall near the exit. He failed an Acrobatics check, fell down, and struggled to his feet.

That triggered the monsters arrival through the doors Cobalt was now next to. They were four short humanoids, seemingly made of iron and shadow, who came charging out of the far door and into the room. Battle ensued. Notes thereupon:

- Unlike us, the “Abides” (as we called the monsters) had no problem traversing the frictionless floor.
- Worse, the Abides could, on their turn, move about 16 spaces, and deliver two highly-damaging “run by” attacks during that movement, so they wouldn’t end up anywhere near us. There were four of them, which meant 8 of these attacks per round.
- After the first two rounds, we had managed very little damage against them, with poor hit rolls and even poorer damage rolls against them. The rolls for the monsters only seemed average, but they had inflicted plenty of damage on us by then. I was as convinced as I’ve been this whole campaign that we were headed for a TPK.
- Piratecat did cleverly/kindly use the NPC battlemind, Grimble Thimbletick, to show us it was possible to hit these things even with the floor – you just had to be crazy enough to move directly toward the monsters, and use them to stop yourself. The basic rules for this were: you could only move in a straight line, and you could either attack somewhere during your first 6 squares of movement, or at the end of your movement, wherever that was. In other words, we could push off from a wall, slide 10 or more squares, and if our movement was stopped by an Abide, we could attack it.
- The walls evinced some odd properties. If they stopped your slide, they felt like rough iron. But if you tried to use them to slowly creep along next to them, they became as slick as the floor, and even a careful step would send you spinning across the room to the wall opposite.
- Not surprisingly, we had to make acrobatics checks pretty often, to not fall over.
- As if all this weren’t bad enough, two more monsters arrived on the second or third round – 9’ tall versions of the Abides, who appeared at the far door where some of the PC’s were. Either because they didn’t have to, or because they didn’t have the sticky feet of the smaller Abides, they never actually came into the ice rink.
- Due to player absence/lateness, we were down one PC for the first third of the fight. We lacked two of our strikers (Logan and Gilran, though we had Thimbletick, a battlemind. (Yay! A Defender!)) When Logan’s player arrived, things started to turn around for us.
- Perhaps worst of all, the smaller Abides were smart enough to identify Bramble as our healer, and they targeted her every round when possible. Her health was down in the single digits for much of the fight, and she and Caldwell struggled to keep her on her feet. Somehow she managed not to drop, though there were about three different times I thought she was toast. Even when she fled out of the room (the way we came in), with half the party between her and the Abides, one of them did a funky shadow-shift, got into our back rank, attacked Bramble, and ran back out again into the ice rink.
- Despite all of this, we won the fight with no deaths, or even anyone dropping unconscious. The following factors contributed to our success:
- The creatures had low hit points – right about 100 each. Once we started landing our attacks, we started knocking them off with decent efficiency – especially after Logan arrived.
- We emptied the bucket of all our healing. Bramble used her Spirit of the Healing Flood, which gave half the party 10 health when they needed it, and regen 2 while bloodied until they did. (We were collectively damaged enough that the regen probably healed an extra dozen points.). She also burned her healing spirits on herself, and I think Caldwell healed her as well. Cobalt used his Stanching armor’s daily power.
- We did a pretty good job of focus-firing on one at a time
- We used most of our remaining dailies.
- We eventually got around to landing attacks that slowed or restrained the Abides, and that turned out to be their Achilles’ heel. Each round one of them couldn’t move, it took 2d12 damage. Each round one of them was slowed, it took 1d12.
- Cool visual effect when the Abides took damage, as their semi-shadow bodies got sucked into their wounds. When they died, their entire bodies vanished into the wound left by the killing blow, leaving no remains behind.
- A note about this battle. The slick floor, combined with the huge mobility of the Abides, made this a tough and exciting fight even though the bad guys inflicted NO states, and only used melee attacks. Kudos to Piratecat for that.
- Finally, while the fight was going on, the poor summoned mule was sliding around the battlefield, braying in terror.


So. That was the first part of the game. Beyond the double doors from whence came the monsters was a Classic Trapped Hallway of Death. It was a long hallway full of spinning blades, protruding-and-retracting spikes, hails of darts, crushers – you name it. Like the Abides, the moving parts seemed to be half-shadow and half-solid, but they sure mangled a torch we tossed in to see what would happen.

Piratecat modeled this as a skill challenge, as we studied the trap as best we could, thinking of ways to help someone through the gauntlet. We hit upon things like: Thievery to realize there was a repeating pattern in the moving mayhem; Perception to actually figure out the pattern and form a plan around it; Arcana to realize a well-placed Tenser’s Floating Disc could block some of the ouchie bits; and (a brilliant idea by KidCthulhu, Stron’s player) Cobalt Bluffing himself into increased confidence that he could make it across unharmed. I don’t know exactly, but I’m guessing our successes and failures in those checks set the ultimate DC for the Acrobatics check needed for someone to get across.

Cobalt made the run. Thanks to our creativity in the first part, and four assists from others (as they counted out the pattern, reminded him when to duck, placed a Tenser’s Disc in the way, etc.), plus a bonus from Bramble’s Speak with Spirits power) he barely made it across. I only rolled a “3” on the check, but Cobalt has a +14 in Acrobatics, so the result was 3 + 14 + 8 (from 4 assists) + 5 (Speak with Spirits) = 30, which, if I recall rightly, was exactly the target number. Whew! We all did our best to describe Cobalt’s ducking, spinning and leaping as he tumbled through the traps, with everyone else calling out counts and warnings and reminders. Incredibly fun.

Once across, Cobalt turned the handle of a door at the far end, and the traps faded away. Everyone else hurried across, and we entered the next area of the dungeon. We stopped and slept in the first room; it had been a long day, and were exhausted, low on surges, and had blown most of our collective dailies.

This was a maze of hallways and rooms, with little to indicate that one way was better than any other. We picked a direction (toward a faint sound of water) which took us down some stairs to another room. The sound of water was gone, which was odd, so we backtracked up the stairs… and found ourselves in an entirely different room. Huh? What? Had we been teleported without our noticing? More experimenting and exploration revealed that we’d never find ourselves where we thought, if we tried retracing our steps. Caldwell used Eternal Chalk to leave a line on the wall, but following back his line led us to a previously-unseen torture chamber, with Caldwell’s chalk line on the wall.

Plus, all the walking around was making us exhausted. Unusually so, really.

Stron thought something here could be illusionary. He closed his eyes and felt around, and discovered that he felt a wall nearby, a wall that no one else could see. Caldwell closed his eyes and felt a skull by his feet, again invisible to the rest of us. We had discovered the “trick” to this area; with our eyes closed, and feeling around, we realized we were in a small 10x10 room, with bones all over the floor. On one wall was what felt like a stone mouth, and by poking a stick into the mouth, we realized there was a keyhole in there. We guessed, correctly, that the key we had acquired early in the dungeon was now relevant. Click!

The illusion faded away, our Witchwater amulets glowed with an eerie light, and we were standing in a tiny room with one door out. The floor was littered with the decaying bones of dozens of former victims.

Also, we were utterly exhausted, the menfolk of the group had five days of unshaved beards, and we were ravenously hungry. Mechanistically, everyone but the indefatigable Strontium was down 5 surges. So, now we’re in this unusual position of being almost depleted in surges, but being topped off on daily powers.

Next game: further into the dungeon!

 

[Piratecat]

The quick version of the "abides" were mechanically based on 9th lvl quickling runners, customized to make them feel more like shadowy versions of redcaps. Speed 12 gives you a lot of latitude for terrifying drive-by attacks. I made them immune to the near-frictionless ground, gave them a 2W encounter attack (jumping on someone with their iron boots), and gave them a painful vulnerability to slow and restrain that the PCs had to figure out on their own. I'm really happy with the way the monster felt.

My players have so much fun agonizing about difficult terrain that I wanted to give them the opposite: restricted movement, but lots of it! I deeply loved the frictionless floor from one of the S modules (White Plume Mountain? Tomb of Horrors? I'm forgetting now, but as there was rusty spikes with "super-tetanus" in the original I'm betting tomb of Horrors.) The plan was to model that.

The PCs got lucky in that the abides had a round of free attacks (1d6+7 dmg each) on Cobalt at the beginning of the encounter, and I missed all of them. Oh, the ignominy. This was balanced by much lower than average initial damage by the PCs. Caldwell the ranger actually hit for 1 point in one round by plinking with a non-magical bow, and both rogues were rolling poor damage. By the time my dice started behaving themselves the group was working smoothly to keep the shaman alive.

The room with hideous shadow-traps continues to make me happy, largely because of how wonderfully the players described and role-played the skill challenge. Man, that was fun. The final DC varied by the number of failures they had going in. It was a little bit of a nail-biter, with two failures and five successes going into the final roll.

The illusory maze at the end was something that I thought might knock some PCs unconscious, or kill them, if the group wasn't thinking. There was a meta-clue in that I was describing the rooms they walked into a little loosely, almost as if they used dream-logic. Moving into each new "room" took a day of game time and knocked off a healing surge. I was hoping that the players would stop, close their eyes, and disbelieve before PCs started dropping. Thanks to the clever trick with the eternal chalk they sussed it out earlier than I'd expected; realizing they were actually in a small iron room filled with bones was something of a shock. This trap was nifty because it was all about player actions to environmental descriptions, and not about game mechanics.

 

[RangerWickett]

The maze is pretty inspired. I might have to steal and retool it to a feywild maze.

I'm curious, have you ever figured out your player's 'gaming styles' as per the old DMG2 list (or various internet variations thereof): steam-venter, actor, explorer, and so-on. Your games sound fun to me, but I feel like my group would want less combat and more opportunities to interact with (and copiously mock) NPCs.

 

[Blackjack]

so why did the players choose what appear to be real world/non-fantasy names?

I assume by "fantasy names" you mean one of two things:
* random made-up gibberish-y names
* vaguely Anglo-Saxon Tolkein-esque names

To me, I find neither of these satisfying. Gibberish names are hard to remember, and thus break my ability to absorb the world. Anglo-Saxon names feel right for a setting that's also Anglo-Saxon-y, which this one isn't, so having lots of "ae" and "y" would break the verisimilitude for me.

Most D&D worlds are vaguely European in culture, with magic and fantasy layered on top. To me, authentic European-sounding names therefore fit the setting better. Your mileage may vary; you may prefer "Aeolfaeryd" and "Ganofarimox" -- but please don't imply that we didn't put a lot of thought and effort into our name choices.